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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24365764">a voice that called me, friend (in darkest of night)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/dastardlyenables/pseuds/dastardlyenables'>dastardlyenables</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon-Typical Violence, Isolation, Long-Distance Friendship, M/M, Multi, Strangers to Friends to Lovers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 10:41:44</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,643</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24365764</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/dastardlyenables/pseuds/dastardlyenables</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Sending dot-dash transmissions into the empty void of space had been more a way to talk at <i>something</i>  than any attempt at establishing communication.  A method of coping, sending short messages of greeting that mean nothing, and hold nothing.  Just quiet "Good morning"s and "Good night"s between him and the universe.</p><p>Echo never expected anything to reach him.</p><p>Dogma never expected anyone to respond.</p><p> </p><p>(or, Dogma is a trooper who clearly can't do much right, but he can do this.  And Echo had long decided that he's an ARC that doesn't leave people behind.  He won't be starting now.)</p><p>Rating subject to change.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>CT-21-0408 | Echo &amp; CT-27-5555 | Fives | ARC-5555, CT-21-0408 | Echo/Dogma (Star Wars), Dogma &amp; CT-5385 | Tup</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>137</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>a voice that called me, friend (in darkest of night)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This fic is, like, 40% Kat's fault, so jot that down.  I would hazard the estimated chapter count is more reliable than hers, but. Only just.</p><p> </p><p>Dogma has always been one of my favorites, and the show did both him and Echo dirty, so I figured I'd fix that.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Dogma figures out pretty early on that no one is exactly sure what to do with him.  It's become easy to tell the longer he’s been here: the way the guards always glance away when they happen to look at him, or how other clones angle their stances away when they're let out in the common area for brief intervals.  How, eventually ,it is just the droids who take over delivering his food because no one seems to want to be close enough they have to acknowledge him at all.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>None of it is malicious, which is good, he supposes. It's more that everyone is all unsure what they should be mad at him about, and honestly half the time Dogma isn't sure himself.  They could choose to be mad that he turned on his brothers, but he was following orders from his general. Or they could choose to be mad he shot his general, but his general was a traitor.  He still couldn't tell you which of those was supposed to be wrong, at least in terms of what the Republic thinks it should be.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It does make it quiet, though. No one wants to talk to him, even if there was more of an opportunity to do it.  He was never good at making friends to begin with, never knew how to reach out, so it doesn't surprise him he's struggling now. He misses Tup–and Tup’s friendship–like a missing limb, but he's not sure he deserves to, so he's not complaining that no one else reaches out either.  It leaves him wrestling his own mind, circling over and over trying to find what hints he should have seen, trying to sort through what markers are just clarity in hindsight and which ones are what made everyone else so certain before that it was okay not to listen to their general's commands.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dogma isn't sure he likes it, this itching under his skin that's got him constantly hyper-vigilant to any possible threat, to any detail. The paranoia that means he's constantly picking up all these cues, and over analyzing them, searching for some hint that he missed.  He’s always seen the fiddly details before, but he doesn’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>understand</span>
  </em>
  <span> them, not the ones with people, and now it’s all he seems to read.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He tries not to spiral down </span>
  <em>
    <span>too</span>
  </em>
  <span> far; he loses track of time too easily and the droids don't like it when he doesn't have the food trays ready to return when they come to pick them up.  Which then forces someone else to show up, and then it's this awkward song and dance of looking-while-not-looking.  Dogma's been a model prisoner for the most part, he knows.  He's not angry at the Republic, or the Jedi.  He doesn't have rage at the system to take out, and the least he can do is not cause any more trouble than he already causes by existing:  a clone that did something wrong but no one can tell him *what* exactly he shouldn't have done, since none of them know either.  He’s fairly sure the guards appreciate it, in their weird, discomfited way, whenever they have to think about him, for long.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They days run together in set, regimented schedules, based on the week, and he establishes his own routine to accompany them.  It makes things easier, having set, established patterns, otherwise there’s too much nothing to keep him from running down spiraling trails to nowhere.  It doesn’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>fix</span>
  </em>
  <span> the problem, but having the routine helps.  Mostly.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Today, though, something has been off about this whole day.  He woke up at the wrong time, maybe, or the first of the droids with breakfast is a few minutes late, but he’ll never know for sure, and in the greater scheme of things it doesn’t much matter.  Everything has been thrown slightly off-kilter, and Dogma’s brain has been rushing to compensate and running itself ragged in all directions. One of the bulbs in the lighting fixture halfway down the hall fluctuates between the adjusted, near-human visible light spectrum and the higher UV favored by the Kaminoans.  It creates something of a dead zone in the hall where none of the guards want to stand for long, because of the headaches caused by the light.  The bulb has been faulty for past three-point-two weeks, but it’s taken a turn for the worse today.  Just one of many weird, small little details that he’s fixating on, keeping him from trying to cobble together the remains of his routine.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dogma isn't even sure what little voorpak trail his mind had followed down this time, but he's startled out of it with a short chirp. He knocks his tray to the floor as he jolts up, and the thin duraplast skitters under his cot. Dogma freezes for a few seconds, listening for the sound again, but he can't seem to hear it any more, instead just a quiet, almost subvocal hum.  He's thankful, at least, that he finished eating, because having to deal with the mess would have been even more trouble. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>It's with a sigh and a groan that he rolls himself out of his cot and onto the floor, before stretching an arm out to shimmy as much as he can underneath to fetch the empty tray.  There's a faint, intermittent, maybe-green glint off the corner of the tray, and Dogma's eyes narrow as he focuses in on it.  It’s not the flicker of the faulty bulb, or any of the other generally problematic lighting in this area of the facilities, low on the priority list. Regular intervals of blinking, in a set pattern. Three short pulses, a pause, a longer pulse, and then four pauses of rest, before starting again.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dogma's fingers reach out, grasping at the tray.  Once he finally grips the rim, he pulls it back towards himself slowly, using the careful shift of the reflected light’s location to triangulate the position of the source.  He's nearly got the tray out, and the blinking light is reflecting at the very last corner of the tray when the reflection suddenly blinks red.  It’s followed by a short chirp—the one that had startled him before, sounding more shrill and sharp with his head half-wedged under the cot.  Dogma winces at the noise, startled again, and almost slams his head against the edge of the cot.  The sound and the light are coming from the far corner of the cot, where the rounded edge doesn't quite meet the curvature of the cell's back wall and the jutted corner of the adjoining wall that sections off the left side of cell's boundaries.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Dogma slides out from underneath the cot carefully, gathers up his empty cup and the dull-rounded cutlery.  He stacks it all on the tray, placing it at the front right corner of the cell as usual for the droid to easily grab.  Dogma then goes back to the cot, lays himself out curled away from his cell's opening, and slowly begins to even out his breath as though settling into meditation or beginning to sleep.  If Dogma tilts his head so his eyes are angled down towards the small crevice between the cot and the wall, he can just see the faintest hint of the blinking flash, back to green.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He counts seconds and groups them by blinks of light and chirps, and after forty-three minutes have passed he hears the quiet trundle of the droid, and the hiss-crackle as the droid goes about deactivating the outer containment wall.  The meal tray and its contents rattle as the droid shoves them into its receptacle. Dogma counts out fifteen more counts of blinks while the containment wall zaps back into place and the trundling sound of the droid continuing down the hall reaches the point where the gentle curvature of the hallway hides his cell from view.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>He shifts closer to the wall and turns his body, sliding his arm down the narrow crevice, feeling his way slowly along with the gentle press of his finger pads.  The tip of his fourth finger brushes against something metallic and cold, and Dogma turns his wrist until the rest of his fingers can press the object up against the wall.  The blunted edges of his nails catch in one of the grooves of the object, and he uses that extra leverage to continue to gently walk the object up the side of the wall with as minimal scraping possible.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When he finally manages to get his hand free of the crevice, he curls his fingers to flip the object away from the wall, sits up on the cot, and catches the object in his palm.  It's an old, long-distance comlink unit, nearly out of power, but otherwise it seems to be in fairly good condition.  Dogma turns it over in his hands, weighs it.  Wonders, briefly, who was in this cell before him, and how they managed to get a comlink hidden away that no one found.  What happened to them, that they left this behind.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>There are steps further down the hall, signaling the start of the evening guard rotation.  Dogma focuses back on the comlink unit, de-assembles the pieces in whatever order makes them come apart the swiftest until he can finally remove the battery pack.  The blinking light goes out, and the low hum disappears.  He holds it carefully in his hands and counts down the seconds for the intervals of blinks before a chirp, and when he is met with silence, does so a second time.  The lights do not return, and he counts it as safe enough to put away.  Dogma wedges the half-assembled pieces carefully in the crease where the cot topper and the headrest meet, and lays back down again.  He can break it apart fully in the morning.</span>
</p>
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